W00T!!!!

I got a job that started Sep 1, 2009 as the Usability Manager with an Internet Service start up (and I really mean start up – I’m the 7th employee!) and things have been so busy I only just thought of posting about it now.  The company is called CrowdTrust and the product will most likely be called Gleanr (we’re in the middle of the branding process right now) and I’ll tell you more about the application once the web site goes live.

What’s really refreshing is to be among developers who really GET User Experience.  I mean, how many start ups can you think of that hire a Usability Manager before hiring a QA manager?

{big time snoopy dance!}

:-j(enni)

Well, that “almost” job with Burntsand I mentioned just after I finished my college diploma courses hasn’t worked out so far.  The thing is, they still really want to hire me, but the economy has put a damper on their efforts to land a new contract – according to their HR person, a process that used to take one to three weeks is now taking three weeks to over a month. This is as frustrating for them as it is for me – while I’m annoyed that they haven’t hired me yet, they’re just as annoyed that they haven’t been hired either!

At this point, the head of the Burntsand Vancouver office is saying he hopes to have the contract approved by July 15th but, of course, he can’t even guarantee that.  This is, unfortunately, an untenable situation for me – as much as I want to work for them and they want me to work for them, I desperately need a job ASAP. So, I’ve been working on my online portfolio (all the jobs I’d like to apply to indicate they require applicants to provide some kind of design portfolio) and have also started to look at possible freelance jobs through Craigslist and the like.

You know what really sucks?

This is the third time I’ve had an “almost guaranteed” job that has, apparently, failed to work out:

The first time was just after we moved back here, when the manager of the department at the company in question actually had all the paperwork to hire me all filled out and had even handed it in to his manager for approval but then the head office declared a hiring freeze for which, although he tried for three days, he was unable to get an exception. (It turned out that the freeze was because another company was starting the process to acquire them.)

The second time was at the start of my current drought of work, and the manager at this other company who had interviewed me once before (but for a different company) said he fully intended to hire me but that he had to meet with a couple more applicants just for the purpose of due diligence. And then, much to both his and my annoyance, he was told by his manager that there was this project manager whom he really liked and he was to hire this other person, using up the “headcount” that he had set aside to hire a user experience specialist!

{sigh} I’m really getting tired of this – it’s almost been a year and a half since I was let go from CGTV… When is all this bad karma going to switch to being good karma?

:-j(enni)

OMG!  The beautiful, climbable, plum tree in our back yard has fallen over due to the weight of the snow in it’s horizontally sprawling branches, exacerbated by the rapid moisture build up overnight (after a day of cold, blowing snow we went into a night with thawing temperatures high enough that the snow melt off the roof dripped so fast it sounded like a rain storm).

It was such a nice tree too. It produced the most delicious and juicy plums in the summer that I used to make some yummy jam.  It’s such a pity.  Nathan is quite devastated – he and his friends loved to play in that tree. (On the plus side, we are moving into a place with a cheaper rent at the end of January anyway, so Nathan wouldn’t have had much time to go climbing again anyway.)

In addition to that immediately obvious destruction, a visual inspection around the house has also turned up the fact that the outer cross beam of the shelter behind our back door has also broken and the umbrella tree in the front yard may have lost branches on one side.  Ron’s going to be going out shortly to knock snow off both structures to reduce any further damage (the second cross beam of the shelter is bending dangerously and appears to be starting to crack) and possibly rescue the umbrella tree if the branches have not actually broken yet.

I do feel sorry for our landlord. That tree was one of the big selling points about this place, because it neatly divided the yard into a sunny half and a shady half making it a great place for barbeques and for kids to play. Especially as, last year at this time, he had to replace all the fences around the yard because the wind storms we had last winter blew them over. That said, when we moved in we mentioned that all the trees were quite tall and really needed to be professionally trimmed to keep them healthy and strong and he wasn’t willing to do it. In this case, he wasn’t even willing to reimburse us if we decided to have it done and they were really too large for us to consider trying to do it ourselves. So, in a way, he brought this down upon himself… (ha! no pun was actually intended)

:-j(enni)

PS: I’ve attached pictures of the serious damage as well as some photos from earlier showing how things looked before.

Plum Tree

Before:

Dec 17, 2008 – Nathan building a snow fort the first day it snowed this year.

After:

Back Door Shelter

Before:

Dec 20, 2008: Attempted photo of birds visiting our back yard for the birdseed we put out

After:

“Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.” – Maya Angelou

In a metaphorical sense, I’m glad I have snowshoes today.  We already had about 15 cm (6” for my American friends) of snow from the first dump last Monday and then it started snowing again about 11:30pm last night (Dec 23) and hasn’t stopped since.  I just went and checked our driveway, which Ron had cleared to the pavement yesterday afternoon, and there’s been 20 cm (8”) since last night.  I’ve heard on the news there could be as much as 30 cm (1’) by midnight tonight.

A White Christmas used to be so rare around here – I remember being particularly disappointed a couple of times when it would snow on the 23rd or early on the 24th but then it would rain, or get a lot warmer and everything would have melted away by the afternoon.  The snow, when we did get it, usually came in late January, early February, and occasionally as late as mid-March. That’s definitely changed – I’ve noticed we’ve had the white stuff on the ground at this time of year a lot more over the past five to eight years.

The weather people are predicting rain by Friday with highs of 8C (46.5F) over the weekend, so I expect everything to start melting and the “flood gates” to open up.  In which case, we’ll all be wishing we had a canoe (it’ll be too cold for a bikini) instead of these snowshoes.

:-j(enni)

It's been six and a half months since I was let go from CGTV Games and I've honestly had enough of it. I apply and get almost no answers and when I do get an answer they interview me and then pick someone else.

I'm good at what I do, I know it, I believe it. I've done a lot of good work over the last 11 or so years. I've gotten lots of praise for jobs well done. Yes, I've made a few mistakes and had a few bad reviews - who hasn't - but on the whole, there's been more positive than negative. I have a lot of skills that are transferable to any number of other fields - Web Design/Development, Game Design, Technical Writing, to name a few.

I'm capable and I'm smart. Hell, I have a fraking Computer Engineering degree!  One does not complete a program like the one at SFU without having a certain level of technical acumen. Yet no one seems to be willing to accept that I could easily get back into the developer groove or that I could pick up the skills I haven't needed to acquire along my previous career path (like Flash and AJAX) with very little effort.

At least there's some hope for a change on the horizon. Services Canada has a program that will provide a grant to anyone who is or has been on Employment Insurance in the last 36 months to help them with skills upgrading and/or acquisition. I'm in the process of filling out the paperwork for the government and have already been accepted at Vancouver Career College / CDI College (VCC recently acquired CDI) to take a subset of their Programmer Analyst: Web Development program. I'm only taking two "units" out of the four required for the full certificate as I don't really need to get a certificate given I've already got my BASc - I really just need to renew my dev skills (which I'll be doing with courses on database programming and design which was not something I studied much at SFU) and pick up skills with the most common web design tools (especially Flash).

One nice thing about the program is that there's a practicum component at the end.  It's normally an eight week practicum but as I'm only taking half the courses mine will only be for four weeks. That should be more than sufficient though - chances are quite high that I'll simply land a job as a web developer wherever the practicum is held, and if that's not somewhere I want to work long term I can always start looking for something else around the same time.

Due to the need to have the paperwork for the grant in the government's hands 4 to 5 weeks before classes start, VCC/CDI has me starting Oct 14th (day after Canadian Thanksgiving).  So, if I don't land a job before then (which would obviously be preferable), we'll be living the student life (and, unfortunately, living on a student budget) from mid-October 2008 to mid-May 2009.  But at least I won't be stuck at home not getting phone calls from companies who don't want to hire me. :P

:-j(enni)

Oh yes one more thing: Luck o' the Irish to ya!  I hope you remembered to wear green today!

• Google
• Amazon.com
• Motorola
• Real Networks
• Starbucks (IT Department)

  If you have any other ideas of companies in the same area that might be looking for a "mid-career User Experience Engineer", please leave a comment with your suggestions.

--=+=--

My name is Jenni A. M. Merrifield and I currently work for Microsoft as a User Experience Program Manager on the Application Security team in the Windows Security Access Control group.  If you want to know more about what I do, check out my professional blog.

When I can actually eek some spare time out of my week, I love to read (almost any genre, but with a definite preference for science fiction and fantasy), I regularly DM and play in FRPGs (mostly D&D v3e5), and dabble in web site design for fun and (occasional) profit.

I originally hail from the land of the Great White North—Canada, that is. I moved to the Redmond/Seattle, WA area from the Vancouver, BC area in August of 2001. I currently live just south of a small city called Mill Creek (north west of Seattle, WA), with my husband, Ron, and 6 year old son, Nathan.

On the career front, I have almost seven and a half years of industry experience in the field of client/server application User Experience. Prior to my current position I was with the Content Management Server team in the Windows Server System group for almost three years and, before that, I worked for NCompass Labs, Inc. (the company that developed the content management application "Resolution" which would eventually become Microsoft Content Managment Server when NCompass was acquired by Microsoft in May 2001) for four years.

Finally, before I joined NCompass Labs in June of 1997 I attended post-secondary school of one kind or another for 11 years, having completed two separate undergraduate degrees: in 1990 I received a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Classical Studies (The art, history, architecture and archaeology of Ancient Rome and Greece) from the University of British Columbia and in 1997 I received a Bachelor of Applied Science majoring in Computer Engineering (focus on ergonomics and user experience) from Simon Fraser University.

And that's the scoop on who I am and what I'm about.

Hello to whoever stumbles across my new MSN Space.  I've decided I rather like the cachet here (even if some of the other blog sites may have more and/or better implemented features), so I've officially closed out "strawberryJAMM's Thoughtful Spot" over at Blogger, and have hung up a new "personal blog" shingle here.

I'll update with my official "About Me" post eventually, and then start adding more stuff as it seems appropriate.

Jenni

In case you're interested, feel free to check out my work related blog at "strawberryJAMM's Security and User Experience Weblog" at MSDN blogs.